September 28, 2012

World’s First Glimpse of Black Hole Launchpad




A strange thing about black holes: they shine.

The current issue of Science Express, the online advance publication of the journal, features a paper by the Event Horizon telescope team – a collaboration which includes Perimeter Associate Faculty member Avery Broderick – that may shed light on the origin of the bright jets given off by some black holes. In a world first, the team has been able to look at a distant black hole and resolve the area where its jets are launched from. This is the first empirical evidence to support the connection between black hole spin and black hole jets that has been long suspected on theoretical grounds.